To achieve these tasks, users would say the word, “Alexa,” which was the magic phrase that alerted the Amazon Echo Dot that an instruction was forthcoming. Then the user would say an instruction, which would be something like, “Play Jersey Shore” or “I want to shop for cat food.”
The Amazon Echo Dot would then respond with the synthesized voice of a woman and attempt to follow the user’s command. This synthesized voice was the personality of the device. It was the ghost in the machine. Its name was Alexa.
The Amazon Echo Dot was one in a line of Echo products offered by Amazon.com, each offering some variation in shape and size, but retaining the same core functionality.
Reader, this was the surface nature of the Amazon Echo Dot.
Its true nature was this: it represented concrete evidence of the disconnect between issues that journalists believed were of public importance and the swells of indifference that these issues produced in the public.
Following the election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency, there was a clamor about the manner in which his campaign may have misappropriated the private information of millions of Americans.
This was all of the media coverage distilled: the users of social media had provided their private information with no intention of it being deployed for anything other than their banal self-expression on platforms owned by megalithic corporations. Its unauthorized use in a political campaign represented a grievous breach of ethics and corporate governance.
If you took this media coverage at face value, reader, you would believe that most people were outraged about turning their private information over to megalithic corporations.
But listen to someone who became a minor literary sensation on the basis of a book that critiqued turning over one’s personal information to megalithic American corporations.
Enthusiastic journalists wrote twenty-seven thousand articles about I Hate the Internet.
It gave the impression of a book that was all dominant, all powerful, all consuming.
But I’ve read the only writing about I Hate the Internet that matters.
Royalty statements.
And so I speak with the authority of someone who managed to get an obscene amount of press coverage for what was, ultimately, an obscure book: most people do not give a fuck or a tuppence about what happens to their private information.
A hockey puck that was always listening.
It was indistinguishable from espionage devices. It sent the inner workings of private homes to a corporation with one of the largest market caps in the world.
There was no illusion about its purpose.
Its nature was both its virtue and its advertising hook.
And at a moment when journalists were producing hundreds of thousands of words about privacy on social media networks, millions of people were buying the Amazon Echo Dot.
By the end of the Year of the Froward Worm, it was a necessary accoutrement of every middle-class American home.
HRH disrobed.
“Please, please, my sweets, you too must remove your store-bought modesty.”
The sex workers disrobed.
“I have requested you because of your academic pedigrees. For this evening of transcendence, I want no Masshole curs trapped in the amber of ignorance. Is it true that each of you has received an Ivy League education?”
“Yes,” said the sex worker with the lease on the apartment.
“Yes,” said the second sex worker, who was lying. She had an undergraduate degree from Babson.
“Yes,” said the third sex worker.
“I believe you to possess what is necessary,” said HRH. “Tonight I demand that you address me only as Enver Hoxha, the former Albanian head of state. Cast back your imaginations to that glorious moment when Hoxha rejected the reforms of Khrushchev as revisionist Leninist–Marxism and took up the cause with Red China. Imagine it! An isolated European country, surrounded by its enemies and the sea, aligning itself with Maoist principles!”
HRH opened up his rattlesnake suitcase.
“As I do not doubt that you learned while earning your Ivy League degrees,” said HRH, “a key difference between Stalinist Marxist–Leninism and Maoism is the Maoist belief in reeducation. The Stalinists would excommunicate the unwanted, while the Maoists enacted programs of reeducation. Why else did the Symbionese Liberation Army bring Patty Hearst into the fold? They demonstrated her to be a fascist insect preying upon the life of the people and through class consciousness reformed her into a revolutionary.”
HRH removed a device from the suitcase.
The sex workers couldn’t see what HRH was holding.
“Tonight,” said HRH, “we shall query Alexa and discover what she knows about the People’s Republic of Albania. When Alexa fails in her knowledge, then your acres of skin will be reeducated. Tonight, the fleshzone is a labor camp and you are its prisoners. Arbeit macht frei, meine Mädchen.”
One of the sex workers caught a glimpse of what HRH was holding.
It was a rhino-hide chicotte, restored and recovered from the Congo Free State.
“Before we embark upon our merriment,” said HRH, “I suggest that we test the ability of Alexa to provide us with information.”
HRH stood over the Amazon Echo Dot.
“Alexa,” said HRH. “Why does the caged bird sing?”
“The caged bird sings,” said the Amazon Echo Dot, “because its heart is still free and using song is an efficient way for birds to communicate over distance.”
“That’s actually kind of cool,” said one of the sex workers.
“Schnell! Schnell!” said HRH. “It is time to make a great leap forward.”
“Alexa,” said HRH, “who was Enver Hoxha?”
HRH pronounced Enver Hoxha properly: En-ver Ho-dja.
“Hmm,” said the Amazon Echo Dot. “I don’t know that one.”
“Alexa,” said HRH, “who was Enver Hoxha?”
HRH pronounced Enver Hoxha in phonetic English: En-ver Hox-ha.
“Here’s something I found on Wikipedia,” said the Amazon Echo Dot. “The Rwandan Genocide also known as the genocide against the Tutsi was a genocide of mass slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority government.”
“Alexa,” said HRH, “who was Enver Hoxha?”
HRH again pronounced Enver Hoxha in phonetic English: En-ver Hox-ha.
“I’m not quite sure how to help you with that,” said the Amazon Echo Dot.
“It should be rather clear that we have long hours of Maoism ahead,” said HRH.
There was a moment when the labor camp screaming grew so loud that the bodyguard burst into the room.
He found two of the sex workers on the bed, crying, bleeding.
The chicotte had offered bitter instruction.
The third was being forced to hold the Amazon Echo Dot over her head for as long as her arms would allow. She’d been instructed to address the Amazon Echo Dot only as Aten, after the Egyptian Sun disc.
“What the fuck is going on in here?” asked the bodyguard. “What the fuck is this shit?”
“My darling patriot,” said HRH. “You have joined us at last. I have waited for your flesh all these long hours. Would you care to act the Gomorrhean? I am your willing receptacle, and if you like, I can ease the path towards priapism with a surfeit of cocaine. Snow is general all over Ireland. It is a dead certainty that a man with your thighs must ache with a clutched need to relieve the vital center. Let rain down your frothing spittle like Agent Orange upon the Vietnamese peasantry!”